Some of us might already known that Google was actually a research project done by the founder Sergey Brin and Larry Page when they were pursuing their PHD doctorate programme in Standford University. And it is now 7 years old.

In fact, when Google was just set up, there were only less than 25 million pages indexed, this number has gone rocket high since it started to serve us and reach countless pages nowadays.

IBM, Intel and Sun were the hardware sponsors to Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Besides, they were using GNU, Linux and Python as the foundation software for Google. No wonder, they seem to be a big threat to Microsoft nowadays. :p

By the way, how many of us have any idea how was the setup of all the machines for the project? Let’s have a look how Google looked like in 1998 :-

This is the server using only 300 MHz Dual Pentium II, 512MB of RAM and nine 9GB harddisk.

Fortunately, IBM was kind enough to donated its F50 IBM RS6000 with 4 processors and 512MB of memory and eight 9GB harddisk drive.

There were three 9GB harddisk drives on the left, six 4GB drives on the right.

There were 5 keyboards, one for each hand of the founders, and one for backup purposes. :p

I am so amazed to see how Google turned from using only 512MB and less than 10GB harddisks to a giant company nowadays. One thing for sure is, they will definitely grow bigger and bigger in the future. :)